An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Racing to World War--HMS Dreadnaught Set it Off

HMS Dreadnaught and the Home Fleet under steam.

On February 10, 1906 the Royal
Navy launched the Battleship HMS
Dreadnaught.She was the sixth ship
of the line to carry that name but she represented a revolution in naval
armament.

When John “Jacky” Fisher
became First Lord of the Sea of the Board of the Admiralty in
1904 he set out to toughly reform and rebuild a hidebound institution.He was heavily influenced, as were top naval
officers in Germany, Italy, and Japan by the theories of the American
officer Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan whose 1890 book The Influence of
Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783and
subsequent studies of more modern conflicts set forth a new doctrine of
achieving world power by the extension of naval power.Mahan’s book, now known only to military and
naval historians, has been called one the five most influential books of the 19th
Century because it helped to set off a worldwide naval arms race.

Fisher was also impressed by the
technological advances of the U.S. Navy and it Maine class
battleships that had made mincemeat of the old fashion Spanish Navy in
1898.The Japanese, adopting the
same model, had crushed the Russians in 1905.All the major sea powers now had battleships
of roughly equal capacity, armament, and speed.

Fisher sent 150 obsolete ships to
scrap and began an ambitious modernization and construction program that
included the creation of a new class of vessel, the destroyer, fast light
cruisers, and experiments with submarines.But at the heart of his reforms were a whole new class of battleships,
of which the Dreadnaught was the
first.

The main innovation was the switch
from mixed batteries of light and heavy guns to batteries of exclusively heavy
guns capable of lethal fire at 5,000 or more yards.This long range capacity was important as
rapid advances in torpedo technology had put battleships at risk of that
kind of attack at the 2000 yard ranges and under at which the Japanese engaged
at the Battle of the Yalu River against the Chinese in 1894 and the American’s
in Manila Bay.

The Dreadnaught featureda main battery
of ten 12-inch guns, along with
twenty-two 12 pounders as her
secondary armament.The revolutionary
ship was also the first be powered by steam
turbine instead of reciprocal engines
greatly increasing her speed.The ship
was also more heavily armored than previous battleship, and armor extended
further under the water line in defense of torpedoes.

Fisher knew that
his efforts were not alone.Both the
Americans and Japanese laid keels for similar ships about the same time.Using techniques he had mastered earlier as
Second Sea Lord, Fisher put pressure on the ship yard Portsmouth to speed production.He wanted to prove to the world, but particularly to the ambitious
Germans, that the Royal Navy would be capable of quickly converting virtually
its whole main battle line to the new class, thus discouraging, he hoped,
attempts to catch up.The keel was laid
in October 1905 and she was launched the following February, an astonishingly
short time.

She was soon
fitted, armed, and completed sea trials and was commissioned in December of
1906.She was made flagship of the Home Fleet.

Far from
discouraging a naval arms race, the Dreadnaught set off a frenzied new round
of construction.In Germany Kaiser Willhelm II ordered the Battle of Surigao
Strait(Imperial Navy) to
step up its own building program.Most
historians agree that tensions between the two empires caused by this naval
arms race were a significant contributing cause of the First World War.

The Dreadnaught’s actual service life was
brief.She was quickly rendered obsolete
by second generation ships.She missed
the only battle between the main German and British fleets in the war, the Battle ofJutland on May 13, 1916 because she was laid up at base in Scapa Flow for refitting.

Her only combat action of the war was the
sinking of the submarine U-29 by ramming her in March of
1915.In the summer of 1916 she was
posted to the Thames in protection
of London and fired her anti-aircraft guns at German
bombers.It was the only time she ever
fired any of her guns in anger.

Shortly after
the war she was placed in reserve and then sold for scrap in 1921 and broken up
in Scotland in January, 1923.

The age of the
great battleships, often called Dreadnaughts in her honor, was itself short
lived.Their effectiveness for fleet to
fleet combat was effectively ended in the age of the aircraft carrier.The last
such combat was the Battle of Surigao
Strait, part of the larger Battle of
Leyte Gulf in October, 1944 when an American task force destroyed a
Japanese force.

The Royal Navy
decommissioned its last battle ship, HMS Vanguard in 1960.The U. S. Navy used the big ships essentially
as floating artillery batteries against land targets in the Korean and Vietnam Wars.Some were
brought out of moth balls to be used again in the same capacity in Lebanon in
1984 and with the addition of Tomahawk
missiles in the Gulf War.The last four Iowa Class battleships,
the last active dreadnaughts in the world, were decommissioned for the last
time between 1989 and 1991.